The revered African American contralto Marian Anderson received many laurels in her lifetime, from institutions, heads of state, and audiences around the globe. Her latest commendation falls closer to home: precisely speaking, the corner of Broad and Spruce Streets, home to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, whose main concert hall is being renamed in her honor.
Marian Anderson Hall — the Kimmel Center’s signature 2,500-seat auditorium, home to The Philadelphia Orchestra since 2001, and known up to this point as Verizon Hall — will be the world’s first major concert venue to bear her name. The announcement was made one day after her 127th birth anniversary, at an event attended by Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, Cherelle Parker, as well as Pennsylvania’s Lieutenant Governor, Austin Davis, the mezzo-sopranos J’Nai Bridges and Denyce Graves, and Ginette DePreist, whose late husband, conductor James DePreist, was Anderson’s nephew.
Also naturally on hand were The Philadelphia Orchestra’s president and CEO, Matías Tarnopolsky, and its music and artistic director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been vocal about fostering a more inclusive model in the realm of classical music.
“We’ve been on a journey for greater representation in symphonic music at The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center for many years now,” Tarnopolsky tells WRTI. “We’ve been featuring the music of Florence Price, Valerie Coleman, William Grant Still, Mary Lou Williams, Margaret Bonds and others. The philosophy from Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the question we put to ourselves, is: if people in positions like ours had been having these conversations 30 years ago, seeing the music of Florence Price on an orchestra program wouldn’t be the exception today.”
But Anderson’s name rings more than a note of inclusion, as Nézet-Séguin emphasizes in a statement: “The legacy of Philadelphia native Marian Anderson is inscribed in the modern history of civil rights in America, and in musical history — from the prejudiced rejection of her artistry to the knowledge that she was one of the greatest voices of the 20th century.” Anderson, born in 1897 and died in 1993, truly was a defining voice of the century — and a figure whose historical significance is hard to overstate.
Conversations about the renaming have been ongoing behind closed doors for the last several years. ”We knew that Verizon’s naming rights were expiring in January of 2024,” Tarnopolsky explains. “It really became clear that it needed to be Marian Anderson Hall.”
The permanent renaming was secured with a $25 million gift from Richard Worley, a longtime board member and former chair of The Philadelphia Orchestra, and Leslie Miller, a former Kimmel Center trustee and its previous acting president. Their commitment, among the largest gifts in the Orchestra’s history, was joined with additional support from Sidney and Caroline Kimmel.
Along with the renaming, The Philadelphia Orchestra has partnered with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to create a Marian Anderson endowed scholarship, which will be awarded annually to two Black students from the region who are pursuing careers in the performing arts or in performing arts administration.
All told, the rededication ratifies a cultural influence that has long been deeply inscribed in classical music, especially among Black operatic singers. "Whenever I think of a great opera singing pioneer, one of the first people who comes to mind is Marian Anderson,” the acclaimed soprano Angel Blue tells WRTI. “She had a rich and mysterious voice which produced a hauntingly low contralto sound. In her voice one can hear the amount of hard work, discipline, and dedication to singing, but also her determination to break down barriers.”
“Dedicating the hall to Marian Anderson is an enormous honor,” adds Blue, who will join her fellow soprano Audra McDonald, pianist Marcus Roberts, Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestra in a Great Stages Gala and concert on June 8, marking the official renaming. “In some way, it makes me feel like I'm a small part of her legacy. Hopefully we will all make our best efforts to stand as tall in our integrity and graceful in our beliefs as Ms. Anderson did. Her legacy lives on as we honor her new performance hall.”
South Philly Roots
Born in Philadelphia, Marian Anderson grew up in a small house on Colorado Street, near the corner of 17th. She was musically inclined from an early age, clanging away at a toy piano as a toddler and gravitating to the violin at age 6, before her family bought a real piano. She sang in school and at Union Baptist Church on 12th near Bainbridge Street.
“All this time I kept on singing in the junior choir at church, mostly alto,” she recalled in her 1956 autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning. “The music we had to sing was not very high, and I could just as well have sung the soprano part, but there were always more sopranos than altos, and I thought I would like to be where I was needed most.”
That practical temperament sustained young Marian after the death of her father, from a worksite accident at Reading Terminal Market. She was 12 and already known locally for her singing, but she helped her mother deliver laundry, among other tasks, to support their family.
Her talent drew community investment, notably from the accomplished singer Emma Azalia Hackley and the People’s Chorus of Philadelphia, which eventually organized her first recital in 1914. A review in the Philadelphia Tribune noted “the singularly rare contralto voice of Miss Marian E. Anderson,” who had just turned 17.
Through the steadfast support of the Black community in Philadelphia, she went on to study first with Mary Saunders Patterson, a Black voice teacher in the neighborhood, and then with Agnes Reifsnyder, who introduced her to Brahms lieder and sight singing. The finer points of vocal technique came through study with Giuseppe Boghetti, a Philadelphia-born opera singer himself, who took her on after hearing her sing the spiritual “Deep River” in his studio on Chestnut Street. Around this time, Anderson met a pianist her age, Billy King, who became her regular accompanist in Philadelphia and beyond — including a shaky 1924 debut at New York’s Town Hall, and a more triumphant set of performances at Lewisohn Stadium.
Anderson’s performing and recording career — the latter of which began with a collection of Harry T. Burleigh spirituals on RCA Victor — were now yielding income. She urged her mother to quit her job scrubbing floors at Wanamakers, and moved them into a house that she bought on South Martin Street, between Catherine and Fitzwater. The house is now the Marian Anderson Historical Residence & Museum; it has been undergoing repairs since flood damage caused by a burst pipe in 2020. Two blocks east is the Marian Anderson Recreation Center, emblazoned with a mural that depicts its namesake in song.
A Civil Rights Icon
“The legacy of Philadelphia native Marian Anderson is inscribed in the modern history of civil rights in America, and in musical history — from the prejudiced rejection of her artistry to the knowledge that she was one of the greatest voices of the 20th century,” affirms Nézet- Séguin in a statement. “Because she was denied the right to sing, Americans were denied the right to hear her extraordinary gifts.”
Anderson is indeed most famous today for a moment when she was refused a stage, though her voice was hardly silenced. She was already an international sensation by 1939 — represented by the impresario Sol Hurok and touted by a confederation of admirers, including maestro Arturo Toscanini, who’d heard her in Salzburg. (“What I heard today one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years,” he proclaimed, a quote that Hurok promptly put to use.)
But a request to book Constitution Hall, then the largest auditorium in Washington, D.C., was rebuffed by the hall’s owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, which maintained a whites-only policy. Anderson performed instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to an audience of some 75,000 people and many more on the radio — an iconic moment in American history, and in a coalescing American civil rights movement.
The fine 2022 PBS American Masters doc film Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands provides a powerful summation of the tensions and triumphs around that moment. A more detailed account can be found in Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey, Allan Keiler’s invaluable biography, published in 2000. Among other things, Keiler shows how carefully the protest behind Anderson’s exclusion was organized (notably by Hurok and Walter White of the NAACP) and how much more involved in the process Anderson must have been, despite her public disclaimers. Both the book and the film credit First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for her pivotal role as a DAR member who resigned over the policy, and smoothed the path to the Lincoln Memorial.
Anderson was never one to make grand socio-political declarations, but she continued to lead in the movement, as the American Masters documentary illustrates. She made a point of entertaining Black soldiers during World War II, supported NAACP initiatives, and presided as a den mother to generations of artists who followed along the path she had blazed — as a Black singer in white-coded spaces, including The Metropolitan Opera, where she made her debut in 1955, breaking the color barrier. “She was the midwife, she paved the way,” attests pianist and composer Damien Sneed. “She was the mother of all that would come behind her.”
Marian and the Philadelphians
Marian Anderson and The Philadelphia Orchestra enjoyed a warm familiarity under the tenure of music director Eugene Ormandy. In A Singer’s Journey, Keiler characterizes their collaboration as “one of Anderson’s longest and most fruitful artistic relationships.” Over a two-decade span between 1937 and 1957, Anderson sang with the Philadelphians a dozen times. Her first recording with the Orchestra was in 1939, when she performed Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53.
Anderson’s history with Ormandy represents just one thread in a tapestry that comprises the Marian Anderson Collection at the Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Housed in 495 boxes, the collection includes recordings, correspondence, contracts and journals, among other materials — like some 4,500 photographs, and more than 1,000 pieces of sheet music.
As WRTI’s Mark Pinto reported in 2020, the Penn Libraries recently digitized this priceless trove, making it possible for anyone to peruse Anderson’s archive. It’s illuminating even to flip through her datebooks; for instance, a maroon-covered 1945 journal chronicles the relentless pace of her touring schedule, as she traveled by train through the midwest, the Pacific northwest and the west coast, before returning east.
An entry for April 5 reads simply, “Philadelphia,” in a tidy cursive, and it’s almost possible to sense her relief at returning home — though she also jots down reminders to pick up flower seeds from W. Atlee Burpee & Co.; buy a coat for her mother (“Persian”); and procure a dish (“Edna’s present”). The following week’s entries include “New York show + home,” then “Home + Franz,” the latter a likely allusion to her regular accompanist at the time, German pianist Franz Rupp.
Then Anderson is back in New York, with a series of dates blocked out for “Recording.” Among the pieces she sang in the studio on April 11, with Rupp on piano, was Robert Schumann's “Der Nussbaum” — “The Nut Tree,” from a floral song cycle he presented to his bride, the former Clara Wieck, on their wedding day.
One year before this recording, to the day, Anderson had appeared at Carnegie Hall with The Philadelphia Orchestra, for an all-Brahms program so rapturously received that she took no fewer than five curtain calls. That detail comes from a New York Times review that singled out Anderson’s performance of the Alto Rhapsody: “Not only does the music lie particularly well for her voice, but the breadth of its emotional content seemed to give Miss Anderson’s voice the freedom of expression it needs to sound its best.”
In truth, Anderson sounded at her best in a dazzling range of settings, singing Brahms or Bach or Verdi — or the spirituals that she performed with such tender authority, from her earliest recordings until late in her performing career.
The realization of Marian Anderson Hall means, among other things, that her memory will preside over countless more moments of musical transcendence — as a lodestar and a compass point, in the city that she always considered home.
For more information about Marian Anderson Hall, visit philorch.org. To browse the Marian Anderson Collection, visit the Penn Libraries online.
